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FirstRain News

It’s on: We’re going to Dreamforce again! And this time, we’ve moved on up to Silver Sponsor status. Our booth last year was packed and buzzing with great conservations, with both attendees and salesforce.com employees wanting to learn more about FirstRain. So, this year we’ll have some more elbow room—and, in typical FirstRain fashion, we absolutely guarantee to have something extra special that will make you want to come on by!
These past few weeks have been really exciting at FirstRain with our launch of our new product, Market Insights, but now it’s time to start looking ahead. The Dreamforce momentum is really picking up, and we can’t wait to participate and show the Cloud community how FirstRain’s big data insight solutions can help companies increase revenue and put their go-to-market strategy into action.
For news and updates as we get closer to November 18, you can follow us on Twitter at @firstrain, and check us out on Facebook. Also, while you’re tuning into Dreamforce buzz (and hopefully getting as excited as we are), don’t forget to listen in to salesforce’s own “The Road to Dreamforce” weekly show to get the latest news and tips to make Dreamforce 2013 the best Dreamforce ever!

On this day in 1984, the space shuttle Discovery took off on its maiden voyage.

And just as the Discovery launch was another important step forward for NASA, FirstRain made another big advancement today with the launch of our newest product, Market Insights!

Our sales-focused solution, Customer Insights, is revolutionizing the big data analytics market and has become a valuable part of the daily workflow at many Fortune 500 companies. But some of these companies are already finding that sometimes customer intelligence alone isn’t enough—in order to truly put their go-to-market strategy into action, their marketing teams need market-focused intelligence as well.

And that’s why we created FirstRain Market Insights. Developed over the last year in collaboration with two of our leading enterprise customers (both major, Fortune 100 technology companies), Market Insights leverages our powerful semantic analytics technology in order to provide relevant, real-time market insights that CMOs, strategic leaders and entire marketing teams need about their specific lines of business.

The combination of our new Market Insights solution with our already popular Customer Insights product (not to mention our recently launched FirstRain for Touch) now makes a powerful suite of enterprise solutions providing unmatched business insights into your target markets and your top customers, helping you grow revenue and (finally!) putting your go-to-market strategy into action.

We’re over the moon about our new product. In fact, it’s left us starry-eyed with wonder—and our early adopters are, too—we hope you’ll let us know what you think of it!

As we saw last year, there’s been a massive wave of Fortune 500 companies adopting touch-based tablets and devices. One result of that has been the proliferation of a whole range of B2B iPad and smartphone apps from companies like us and salesforce.com to enable those mobile, touch-powered professionals with the intelligence and data they need to understand and engage their customers, as well as open up new opportunities.
However, there’s a second big enterprise trend that’s picking up momentum as well: that of large companies who are developing internal enterprise apps for touch-based tablets and devices, for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.
And because it’s a need that more and more of our customers are requesting every day, we’re very excited to announce this morning the launch of FirstRain for Touch, a new, powerful and yet easy way to drop highly relevant customer intelligence for your sales and marketing teams into your enterprise iPad app—and the first enterprise customer intelligence solution built for the Salesforce Touch Platform.
Last fall, at their annual Dreamforce ‘12 conference, along with their high profile launch of Salesforce Touch, salesforce.com also announced the launch of the similarly named (but very different) “Salesforce Touch Platform.” And unlike Salesforce Touch—which is a downloadable app for iPad, iPhone and Android created for their users to easily access salesforce.com data and capabilities on their devices—the Salesforce Touch Platform is a Software Developer’s Kit that developers within a large enterprise can use to create their own, internal touch-device apps for their sales and marketing teams.
Our new FirstRain for Touch solution is an elegant and personalized set of components that have been optimized for use on touch-based devices, and can be easily dropped into enterprise apps created by companies, just like those developed using the Salesforce Touch Platform SDK. And the demand has been notable. For example, we have at least 3 large, current customers (all in the Fortune 500) who are each planning or have already created and deployed their own iPad apps for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.
But perhaps one of the nicest aspects of this launch has been the opportunity to work with the great folks at salesforce.com. We have lots of clients in common and solutions that have always been highly symbiotic, and so this area is just one more place where we find common opportunity to help each other succeed. Our thanks to Clarence So, their Executive Vice President of Mobile Strategy, for his kind comments about our release: “It is exciting to see the rapid innovation that partners such as FirstRain are delivering on our trusted mobile platform, FirstRain for Touch will provide customers with the right intelligence to help them connect with their customers in entirely new ways and accelerate business success.”
If you’re interested in more information about FirstRain for Touch, let us know!

It was the 12th anniversary of FirstRain India and all the Rainmakers contributed to make it an unforgettable event.

The celebration started with a cake cutting ceremony inside the office premises and then we all headed to the party venue “The Woods.” The sunny winter day, pool side view and non-stop great food added to the mood.
The fun started with games among the six event teams followed by a treasure hunt. Funny props were very popular throughout the event.
We were amazed to see how each team performed in the individual performance round. I must say we do have great talent at FirstRain.
Singing, mimicry of FR superstars along with enacting live moments from the office added color to the celebration.

After the well-spent hours in the sun with games and performances, it was the time to get recharged again so we all headed to the party hall. The evening was a BLAST! Awesome variety of drinks and snacks aside, there was great music which very quickly moved everyone to the dance floor. The energy was amazing and no one seemed in any hurry to head out for dinner. Finally, FirstRain India MD, Aparna Gupta had to announce a final 15-minute dance session with everyone on the floor before dinner. The dinner and dessert did not disappoint at all either. It was a perfect end to a rocking party.

The full day event brought us a great opportunity to interact with each other in an altogether different setting and also highlighted the hidden talent within each of us apart from performing best at our workstations. Each of us was handed a memento—a soft photo frame with a group photograph from the event.

In the end, we must say…
At FirstRain, it’s not only about working hard, it’s also about having fun at work!
Keep going Rainmakers.. Make the ‘FirstRain kite’ fly higher and higher across the roaring wind.

We had a very exciting day at the office in December. FirstRain India celebrated a group of employees who have been with FirsRain for over seven years! Each employee was honored for their commitment and hard work with a bouquet of flowers and a special lunch.

The event was a complete surprise to most of the team. On December 19th, around lunchtime, Chitra, our HR Manager announced a list of people who each were given a bouquet of flowers from Aparna Gupta, our India MD. The rest of the team really had no idea why they were receiving flowers until we suddenly looked around and realized who was being recognized. All of the people called out, had been at FirstRain the longest.

The lunch was very special, full of memories and nostalgia. We went through the hard times and the good times, but most importantly—the fun we have had through the journey of building FirstRain to what it is today. Interestingly enough, the majority of the recognized joined FirstRain as single people and now most are married with kids! They have been through many different roles, working with different managers throughout the company and truly have grown over the years.

In the midst of our tight work schedules, releasing deliverables, promising product outlook and anticipation of FirstRain becoming REALLY successful, this came up as a great surprise.
Congratulations to all of you for being a part of the core team of FirstRain and thanks a ton FirstRain for making us feel special!

Help nominate FirstRain and Penny for the 6th annual Crunchies Awards! The award ceremony recognizes the most captivating startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. It’s co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch.

The ceremony will take place January 31, 2013 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. You can vote for FirstRain in the “Sexiest Enterprise Startup” and “Best Content Discovery Application” categories. You can also vote for Penny in the “CEO of the Year” category.

The past few weeks have been extremely busy and exciting as we prepare for Dreamforce, which is now only a week away! But today, I have some other exciting news to share, the launch of our new solution—the FirstRain Performinator!

Performinator is our newest solution for delivering strategically tuned customer intelligence for major account sales and marketing teams right into their existing CRM, social enterprise platforms, smartphones and tablets. Performinator helps your entire team of sales and marketing pros understand their customers’ business as well as your superstars do. And for the thousands of early-adopter users who are already getting FirstRain Performinator today, it’s the ‘carrot‘ that gets your people engaged in and drives value from your CRM and platform investments. Don’t YOU want to ‘Be the Carrot‘?

Most sales and marketing teams don’t have the time to gather the deep knowledge of their customers and end-markets that’s needed to really challenge their customers, uncover opportunity and spot risks. FirstRain already delivers the right intelligence to help solve this challenge, but with Performinator we make it so easy, and so well-tuned to your customer markets that each of your users are transformed (no phone booth required) into your company’s go-to experts on your most significant customers.

In fact, at Dreamforce next week, leaders from GE Capital and FirstRain will be discussing the new solution and how they are embracing the carrot. If you’re interested in attending the session and learning more about Performinator, you can do so here.

Superman may use his super powers to fly, but Performinator uses its powers to transform your sales and marketing teams!

Dreamforce season is upon us! Attendees and Salesforce.com employees are talking about what they are wearing and not wearing (I really hope not!) to the event, the Dreamforce party app is hopping, SaaSy videos are going viral, animated gifs are turning up everywhere, sessions are filling up fast and rumors are flying around.
So what are we doing in preparation? Well, some hard work of course as we coordinate our booth (#1626), our customer session [360° of Excellence: How GE Capital Drives ROI Through Customer Intelligence], our team schedules and our client appointments—but also some fun, because that is how we roll here @FirstRain …
If you’ve been following @FirstRain or Penny, Ryan or myself on Twitter, you may have noticed we’ve been tweeting out about our new customer intelligence Tumblr: “You Had Me At Hello, Letters to Marc Benioff“, with a couple new posts a day.So what exactly is it? You Had Me At Hello are letters directly from Penny to Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s CEO. They are ‘penned’ in Penny’s own voice—no marketing content editor behind the scenes—and are what our COO, YY Lee, recently called “like passing hallway notes between two CEOs”.
We have had a lot of positive feedback from our customers (including many who are mutual customers with Salesforce.com), along with many ”thanks for making me smile.” This ticks off our #1 objective as we all continue to be manically busy trying to prep for Dreamforce, deliver our updated AppExchange offering, work on a couple of new client SFDC implementations and continue to drive value to our customers rolling out tools like Sales Cloud.
Here are some highlighted posts from the Tumblr in the last week that might also make you smile:

Next week SLA (Special Library Association) is hosting their annual conference in Chicago and FirstRain will be in attendance. Daniela, our Director of Business Development, MLIS, a long time member of SLA and champion of information professionals in the Enterprise will be attending and is looking forward to catching up with many of you there!

In addition to learning more about new trends and how information professionals are ensuring that they are “’future ready’ by exchanging ideas and connecting with thousands of fellow information professionals“, Daniela will be looking to meet up with information professionals who are currently working or are trying to get involved in Enterprise Social Business projects incorporating social enterprise software like Salesforce.com/Chatter, Yammer, SharePoint, Jive, IBM Connections, Tibco, Cisco Webex Social and others.

The role of the information professional is often an important one in these enterprise projects, and Daniela (who works directly with these vendors as FirstRain partners, and with the enterprise customers deploying these solutions) would like to see more information professionals involved and driving these projects.

SLA2012 is located at the McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois from July 15th-July 18, 2012. For more information on SLA2012 please visit their website.
If you are interested in touching base with Daniela please send her an email dbarbosa@firstrain.com or via twitter @danielabarbosa.

I love release days. Not only is there the excitement of announcing great, new product features, but there’s a real thrill each time I see yet another amazing, customer-focused accomplishment for FirstRain. However, release days are exciting for our customers too, since it’s a reassurance that we are working hard for you and your business needs.
When I started at FirstRain (almost one year ago!), we had just announced the integration of our mobile platform for iPhone and Android devices. Since then I’ve seen the introduction of several new products, such as: the development of the iPad app, the introduction of the FirstRain ECI system, and more recently, the FirstTweets and visualization analytics integration. We’ve really come a long way in just under a year!
Today, we at FirstRain have put out our July 2012 Product Release, and with it we are adding some great new updates and additions to many of the great new features we’ve developed in the past year. This month’s release is all personalization. We’ve updated our iPad app, improving the in-app monitor experience, taking an already great app and making it even more powerful and useful. So if you’re a FirstRain user who hasn’t yet downloaded FirstRain for iPad, now’s a great time to do so!
We’ve also updated our iPhone and Android apps and added in some nice, new features throughout the product to better personalize and share your customer intelligence experience. This release focuses on taking what we already have that works well and making it even more personal.
For all of you who are FirstRain customers, I encourage you to check out these new updates and, as always, please let us know what you think!